For all the talk about paperless offices, many firms continue to drown in a sea of paper. Check out this recent article from AccountingToday that talks about getting closer to a paperless office.

Three important takeaways are:

1. Document management and related applications can offer any size firm a less paper-intensive office.

2. Metadata is probably the most important component of a file or document management application. Metadata can consist of the file’s author, the original creation date, last accessed date, the version number and more.

3. Going paperless is not just for you; consider your clients and prospects and their needs.

Don’t Forget Your Business Cards

While considering the needs of your clients and prospects, think about how many of your printed business cards get thrown away before being added to someone’s contact list. What if you could make it easier to accurately transfer your contact information without wasting any paper?

As the leading provider of mobile business cards to professional services firms, Vizibility offers an affordable, robust, paperless business card solution. You can see it for yourself by viewing a sample mobile business card at viz.me/maryvizcard. We also have a brief, two minute introductory video to help you quickly judge if Vizibility’s mobile solution can help your firm.

57% of Top Accounting Firms Should Expect to See a Decrease in Mobile Traffic After April

For the third year in a row we have reviewed the websites of the 100 largest accounting firms (using the AccountingToday.com Top 100). Even though 2015 continues a positive trend, 57% of the top accounting firms still do not have a mobile-friendly website.Email us to get the full list of top 100 accounting firms which have mobile sites.

Don’t Let Mobile Savvy Competitors Steal Your Leads

As the leading provider of mobile business cards to professional services firms, our customers have asked us for an affordable, robust and quick-to-implement mobile website solution that will help them meet this Google deadline.

For the third year in a row we have reviewed the websites of the 350 largest law firms (using the NLJ 350). Even though 2015 continues a positive trend, 53% of the top law firms still do not have a mobile-friendly website.

For law firms, mobile devices generate one-third of the website traffic reported by FindLaw customers. But this growing issue is foreshadowed by mainstream browsing which skews 50% higher than that. According to a February 2015 IBM Digital Analytics Benchmark survey, mobile traffic accounted for 46.5% of all online traffic. Even if you don’t have a lot of traffic from mobile devices today…you will.

The fact that less than half of top law firms have a website optimized for mobile devices is great news for firms that do. Law firms and other professional services organizations that deliver the right experience to the right device are sending the message that they are technically savvy and are connecting with a new generation of clients. They’re not only making it easier to win new business, but they may also be making it easier to recruit.

Surprise Missing Feature – vCard Download

Making it easy for your site visitors to save the contact information for your professionals is a key function for any law firm website. That is typically done via a downloadable vCard, the standard file format for electronic business cards.

Almost all (98%) of the NLJ 350 websites offer a vCard download from the bio pages on their desktop website, but only 21% offer the vCard download on their mobile sites. We were surprised by this finding as arguably it’s just as important, if not more so, to put the vCard on your mobile site so that site visitors can contact your professionals immediately.

Get the Full List

To see the full list of NLJ 350 firms which have mobile sites, including those with and without mobile vCard downloads, email us.

New Vizibility Study Finds Defect Rates as High as 36% Among the Top Three Card Scanning Apps

LinkedIn recently announced that on July 11th it will discontinue the CardMunch business card scanning app it acquired in 2011, and that all users will be migrated to Evernote’s premium business card scanning service.

Business card scanning machines and apps have been on the market for about two decades, with hundreds of business card scanning apps available on iTunes and Google Play today. People use these solutions because they want to save time by automatically scanning the content of business cards into their digital address books. Unfortunately, many of these apps are inefficient because they cause significant errors that must be detected and corrected by their users.

To quantify the defect rate of business card scanning apps, we randomly collected and scanned 100 business cards from a variety of professions and scanned them using three popular business card scanner apps: Evernote, FullContact and the Neat desktop scanner. All cards were scanned in a controlled environment under optimum lighting conditions. Each scan was then evaluated for accuracy based on the percent of characters translated accurately.

Professional Services Firms with 4 Specific Features on Website Bio Pages have 39.9% Higher Average Revenue Per Partner

Last month we surveyed marketing professionals within law and accounting firms to understand how professional services marketers measure the success of their marketing activities. We created a new infographic to illustrate the findings, and hosted a webinar to dig deeper into the results. Read the full announcement here.

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Marketers within professional services firms reported that:

1. The top metric of success is firm revenue/profit margin, followed by client satisfaction then new business development.2. The top three most important marketing investments for professional services firms are the website, branding and public relations, with the website being the only one ranked as “critical.”3. Print advertising and blog(s) were ranked as “not at all important.”4. Firms who are not successful in meeting their revenue goals measure success the same way as successful firms, but they have different priorities for where they invest in marketing.

Specifically, law firms with the following four website bio page features have an average of 39.9% higher revenue per partner than firms that don’t ($669,499 vs. $478,529):

1. Multimedia Links or RSS Feeds: include links to RSS feeds or other multimedia resources for the site visitor to learn more about the professional.2. Languages: let potential clients know in which language(s) each of your professionals are fluent.3. Share: provide links to share the professional bio in email or social media.4. Mobile Websites: provide a mobile-optimized version of your website, including online bios, for your site visitors who are using mobile devices.

This infographic may be republished using the following attribution: “Infographic courtesy of Vizibility LLC”

Survey Methodology
In February and March of 2014, Vizibility and ALL-STATE LEGAL sent formal invitations by email to the membership of the Legal Marketing Association (LMA), membership of the Association of Accounting Marketing (AAM), emails to current customers who have marketing responsibilities within their firms, as well as sourcing responses from SurveyMonkey’s targeted database. All sources outside of LMA and AAM included only one individual per firm. The survey filtered out responses from vendors that service the legal and accounting industries, as well as attorneys and accountants who do not have marketing responsibilities within their firms. We received 392 total responses, of which 234 (59.7%) were from legal marketers, and 158 (40.3%) were from accounting marketers. The 21 bio page features were inventoried from the public websites of the NLJ 350 during the same period. Law firm revenue and partner figures were assembled from publicly available sources and include a mix of 2012 and 2013 data. The bio page features of all 350 firms were included in the stack ranking of most implemented features but only firms with reported revenue were included in the correlation of features-to-revenue per partner.

Vizibility is excited to announce that we have been acquired by ALL-STATE, the nation’s premier engraver and printer for professional services firms.

As the nation’s premier engraver and printer for professional services firms, we see business cards as the first form of mobile marketing. By marrying print and pixels, ALL–STATE is redefining the traditional business card to keep up with today’s technology and support client development.

Whether you’re an individual or with a firm, it’s easy to include your QR code on your printed business cards. Call 800.222.0510 to learn how ALL-STATE can streamline your printed and mobile business card ordering process into one seamless workflow. If you do decide to try ALL-STATE for your printed business cards, you’ll receive an unlimited number of vizCards™ for free.

Are You Mobile Friendly or a Mobile Frenemy?

In 2012, smartphones and tablets out-shipped PCs by 2-to-1. People are using mobile devices more frequently to research professional services. Companies without a mobile experience drive 61% of their mobile traffic to their competitors.

However, people use different devices for different reasons. Simply porting an experience originally designed for a PC to a smartphone can make it more mobile-frenemy than mobile-friendly. According to Google, 57% of visitors won’t recommend a business with a poorly designed mobile experience. A device specific approach to content and functionality is critical to consider.

Webinar: 13 Stats and 5 Tips You Can Use Immediately to Justify, Plan and Deliver a “Mobile First” Experience

To help understand the positive economic impact of an effective mobile strategy, Vizibility has compiled 13 definitive metrics that are shaping mobile strategies of the world’s most successful companies. The stats are available as an infographic below.

Larry Bodine, Editor-in-Chief of Lawyers.com from LexisNexis® Martindale-Hubbell®, is joining Vizibility CEO James Alexander to host a webinar on Wednesday, February 20 at 12pm EST, to discuss these findings and offer 5 immediately actionable tips you can use now as part of justifying, developing and executing your mobile strategy.Register to attend the webinar.

Inc. Magazine’s John Brandon reviewed the Vizibility Mobile Business Card in the February 2013 issue. His conclusion after sharing his Mobile Business Card at a major trade show: “I can rest easier knowing my contact information is safely stored in the phones of the people I meet, just a tap away.”

This week Vizibility announced several new customers including Edwards Wildman Palmer LLP, an AmLaw 100 firm with 625 lawyers and 14 offices across three continents; Goldberg Segalla LLP, a law firm with more than 140 lawyers in 11 offices across the Northeastern U.S. and Europe; and Marks Paneth & Shron LLP, the 32nd largest accounting firm in the United States with a significant presence in the New York region.

Vizibility also announced that top printer BurdgeCooper has begun offering Vizibility to its customers. BurdgeCooper is the world’s largest engraving company and one of the nation’s largest small-format commercial printers. Don Burdge, President of BurdgeCooper, noted, “Vizibility’s Mobile Business Card is the first viable, logical, scalable, mobile-friendly ‘bridge’ to the digital world that we’ve seen. When combined with our world-class printing capabilities, Vizibility will help us expand our customer base while deepening our relationships with current clients.”